Navigating authority and legitimacy when ‘outsider’ volunteers co-produce emergency management services

McLennan, Blythe; Whittaker, Joshua; Kruger, T; Handmer, John

doi:10.1080/17477891.2020.1727829

Cited by 23 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Second, interviewees emphasised the importance that students were led by students, and not disaster managers, a lesson learnt early in the SVA’s September 2010 earthquake response. This element of maintaining distance from established response agencies, whilst also fostering cooperative working relationships to enable access to the disaster area or information briefings, is a tension that reoccurred through the SVA’s other disaster responses, and which resonates with research by McLennan et al ( 2021 ).…”

Section: Discussion: Cross-cutting Lessonsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…5.4 ). This emphasis on speed in order to demonstrate the group’s usefulness and reliability in the post-disaster environment are in part reflective of the struggle that informal groups can have to be recognised as legitimate actors in the post-disaster environment, with dominant hierarchical approaches to emergency management tending to exclude or marginalise volunteers (McLennan et al 2021 ). For volunteer groups within this context, a potential source of tension if seeking to repeatedly respond to disaster is the juxtaposition of the need to act with speed, on the one hand, and the importance of taking time to listen to affected groups, reflect on internal capabilities, and having adequate security to decide not to act, on the other.…”

Section: Discussion: Cross-cutting Lessonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“A shovel or a shopping cart”: lessons from ten years of disaster response by a student-led volunteer group

et al. 2021

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Recent years have seen growing interest in enabling volunteers to play a more pronounced role in disaster response, and yet efforts to systematically analyse this crisis volunteer action, particularly among young people, have been surprisingly limited. This study examines the case of the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) in Aotearoa New Zealand, a student-led group which over the space of a decade has responded to multiple disasters, including earthquakes, floods, fires, a terrorist attack and the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews, our analysis compares the practices adopted by the SVA in response to these different crises and identifies how members and supporters of the group have come to understand its capabilities, limitations, and conditions for effective operation. We present a framework of cross-cutting lessons of “why”, “who”, “when”, “what” and “how” and demonstrate the ways they have been built upon for each new disaster mobilisation. In distilling, the key lessons of a youth-led crisis volunteer group that has mobilised for a spectrum of disasters, this paper contributes to theoretical understandings of how groups at a local level learn after sequential disasters, and the conditions and considerations that enable such groups to effectively—and repeatedly—“meet a need” in disaster response.

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Section: Discussion: Cross-cutting Lessonsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Discussion: Cross-cutting Lessonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“A shovel or a shopping cart”: lessons from ten years of disaster response by a student-led volunteer group

et al. 2021

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“…Although acknowledging the importance of informal volunteers and appreciating the demand for more flexible and inclusive approaches to volunteering, we found the activities of formal and informal volunteers overlapping in New Zealand's rural setting. Although there is a need to better understand how these two groups can work together, acknowledging the different operational logics of formal and informal rural institutions in emergency response (McLennan et al 2020), our research with actor-leaders provides a basis for examining how coordination and cooperation can be achieved between local sites of resilience building at different scales. These findings offer further insight on the importance of local deliberation and agency in identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in hazard assessments (Barnett et al 2008, Henly-Shepard et al 2015.…”

Section: Volunteer Capacities For Building Rural Community Resiliencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the disaster space, there is growing emphasis on the need to better understand the demands and pressures on formal volunteering traditions, e.g., through emergency services (Whittaker et al 2015, McLennan et al 2016. For example, some have shown an emphasis on legal liability (authorization) and formal cultures of volunteer resourcing (legitimacy) as constraints for building community resilience (Whittaker et al 2015, McLennan et al 2020. In other cases, local community groups hold primary responsibility for disaster resilience (Hayward 2013, Blackman et al 2017, despite capacity and resourcing limitations (Halliday et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wildfire volunteering and community disaster resilience in New Zealand: institutional change in a dynamic rural social-ecological setting

Grant¹,

Langer²

2021

E&S

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Wildfire is a major environmental hazard, yet the social and institutional aspects of wildfire risk management have received limited attention in the literature. Considering future climate change, changing demographics, and the increased demands on fire services more generally, there is an urgent need to better understand the significance of volunteers in emergency management.Volunteering brings together community actors and formal institutions in responding to natural hazards including wildfires. In this paper, we use systemic co-inquiry with volunteer leaders to better understand how to integrate formal and informal volunteers by addressing how resilience is being enacted and what opportunities exist for building community resilience. We examine practices of transitioning from past norms of volunteering to create new institutions for supporting community resilience to wildfires. Findings demonstrate the need for the emergency management sector to promote community resilience through the support of informal volunteers and move beyond traditional representations of rural fire brigade volunteers' roles as firefighters. Vulnerabilities at different organizational scales, community, brigade, and regional, limit existing arrangements for wildfire volunteering, and highlight the need to adapt to changing contexts. Opportunities for building community resilience are identified, including supporting non-firefighting roles for brigade volunteers; aligning with spontaneous volunteers for enhancing rural community disaster preparedness; and outreach to support preparedness activities in isolated and remote communities. Building on the direct experiences of our participants, we articulate the importance of institutional reflexivity involving localized reflection on volunteer organization as a vehicle for change toward more resilient wildfire futures.

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“…These make up the general frame for anticipatory innovation governance mechanisms ( Figure 3.1) that will be outlined below. Authorising environments can be internal to the organisation and informal in nature, but also extremely formal or external in nature (McLennan et al, 2020). These environments in many cases overlap and interact to produce authority and legitimacy in complicated ways.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Anticipatory Innovation Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipatory innovation governance

Tõnurist¹,

Hanson²

2020

OECD Working Papers on Public Governance

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Navigating authority and legitimacy when ‘outsider’ volunteers co-produce emergency management services

Cited by 23 publications

References 22 publications

“A shovel or a shopping cart”: lessons from ten years of disaster response by a student-led volunteer group

“A shovel or a shopping cart”: lessons from ten years of disaster response by a student-led volunteer group

Wildfire volunteering and community disaster resilience in New Zealand: institutional change in a dynamic rural social-ecological setting

Anticipatory innovation governance

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